Tag Archives: glitch

I spent the weekend working in Flash. I love Flash when I get to work with it consistently, but when it’s been awhile, it makes me a little crazy, and in this case it was Actionscript 2 that someone else had originally coded, so the crazy went to 11.

This time I was having trouble with a scrolling text box that contains a LOT of information. For some reason the bottom half of the content wasn’t showing up, even though the box continued to scroll that far. I think I spent half an hour trying to figure out why it was doing that until I stumbled on an accidental fix–toggling the “Selectable” box in the textbox properties. Voila! Problem fixed, if not necessarily solved.

It bothers me that I don’t know exactly why it was only hiding the bottom half of the box. I know it was about the size of the box, not the lines of content–when I reduced the line-height, more text showed up, but not all. I suspect it has to do with the function that created the scrollbar, but having to unravel all those mathy variables–especially when AS3 is my native Actionscript language, not 2–is a task I just can’t motivate myself to tackle, so I’m going with the mystery fix.

Today one of the WordPress MU blogs I administer (no, we have not updated them yet, don’t ask) played a little trick on me and ate some of its posts. Not all of them, mind you, just some of them, and all from the same category. I won’t lie, there was definitely some panic running through my email inbox. I contacted ITS in blind terror that it wouldn’t be recoverable, especially since a reporter was going to be accessing that site at any moment to do a story on it, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. And because this is the way with emergencies, everyone was at lunch.

There was nothing more I could do from my end, so I sat back and waited, chewing my nails and unable to concentrate on anything else. About an hour later, ITS guy came moseying along to my desk, and said, “I don’t understand the problem, I can see everything just fine.”